Li had used a knife to slash the face and arm of his victim. Apparently contrite over what he had done, Li paid 17,800 yuan ($2,200) in compensation and turned himself in to police. He eventually came up for trial and was found guilty. Before the sentencing, though, the judge entered information about Li's crime into a computer program. Based on the crime, the victim's injury, and the fact that Li had paid compensation and surrended himself to authorities, the software calculated that he deserved a 5.4 month jail sentence. The judge gave him six.

Welcome to modern sentencing procedures in China, where a pilot project is underway to study the feasibility of such computer-assisted sentencing. Computers aren't capable of deciding cases, of course, but they can easily give judges access to sentencing guidelines and a massive body of precedent that makes it easy to see how others have dealt with mitigating circumstances.

The goal of the program, which was developed by engineers at Boya-Yingjie Communication Science, is to standardize sentences across the Chinese judicial system and to rein in corruption among the judiciary. Judges are not bound by the software's recommendations, but the program's massive legal database makes it an excellent starting point for sentencing.

"The system will avoid different penalties for the same crime," said a team of Chinese political scholars. "Its usage will help enhance the efficiency of criminal trials."

The UK's Daily Mail says that "criminals in China face being sent to the firing squad by a computer," since China has 68 crimes on the books that merit the death penalty (including economic crimes). Most executions involve a single bullet to the brain, though mobile execution vans are also popular for delivering lethal injections. China executes more people each year than the rest of the world combined.

Whatever your stance on China's use of the death penalty, this is not a case of people being sent off to die by computer. The Chinese system simply provides recommendations based on law and precedent; judges in Western countries routinely use electronic search tools to do the same thing.

What is different about the Chinese software is that, in the end, it displays a number. There is something quite powerful about a computer doing a set of calculations and spitting out a specific number like 5.4 months in jail, and it presents an obvious temptation to regard the number as "scientific" and more accurate than human interpretations of the law. As Chinese legal scholars note, though, every case is different, and these differences may not be fully accounted for by the program's use of mitigating factors. As usual, there are some things computers just can't do.

Many links in the original article, by the way.

I actually like this idea. Have it as an advisory service for judges, but add in a record of how the judge actually rules, which would allow for large discrepencies from the norm to be reviewed by third parties for potential penalties on judges, like the (sickening) cases of pedophiles getting off with excessively light sentences with sympathetic judges, or similar.

if ($person == $party_level[4]) {
$sentance = 0;
while($bribe++)
$sex_slaves++
}
else $person = $organ_harvest;_________________bi-chromaticism is the extraordinary belief that there exists only two options
each polar opposite to each other
where one is completely superior to the other.